The present application relates to software and more specifically to user interfaces and accompanying menu systems for facilitating navigating or accessing data or software functionality.
Menu systems are employed in various demanding applications, including web blogs, search engines, merchant websites, and business enterprise applications, such as Human Resources (HR), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Project Management (PM), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) applications. Such applications often demand efficient menu systems that enable rapid and intuitive access to desired information and functionality.
Conventionally, software application menus remain relatively fixed, despite whether underlying data changes. To access underlying data, a user must often employ an application's menu to navigate to a particular user interface display screen or dialog box. The dialog box may provide a search field for searching for desired data. Underlying data, often called transactional data, may be returned as search results. When a user wishes to perform a particular operation on the retrieved data or to access related data, the user navigates the menu again to search for the related data or to access a user interface control corresponding to the desired operation. Selection of the user interface control may trigger display of a transactional page with additional user interface controls for modifying or approving a transaction or aspect of the data.
This process of repeatedly navigating a menu to locate data and then navigating the menu to perform an operation on the data, may be particularly inefficient and time consuming, especially if the user has not been trained to use the software.
In an example scenario, a user browsing a merchant website may wish to purchase a camera. The user employs the website's menu system to locate cameras. Once the user locates cameras for sale, the user may be required to search for a particular camera. When a webpage corresponding to a particular camera is found. A user may need to navigate to another page to purchase the camera. If the user wishes to purchase batteries for the camera, the user may be required to navigate the menu system again or otherwise enter data in a search field. To purchase a lens for the camera may require further navigation and/or searches. Requisite menu navigation, searching, and so on, may be counterintuitive to users and may lead to reduced sales and reduced customer satisfaction with the website.